GMAT Scoring

How the GMAT is scored

The score(s) you will see when you have completed your official GMAT has four different components:

The Analytical Writing Assessment (scored 0-6)

Integrated Reasoning (scored 1 to 8)

Verbal and Quant - Separate - (each has a scaled score from 0 to 60)

Verbal and Quant - Cumulative - (Between 200 - 800). This fourth cumulative score is the score students refer to most often.

You will also be given a percentile ranking in both the Verbal and Quant sections. This percentile corresponds to the percentage of people whose score is lower than yours. If you are at the 90th percentile, this means you scored better than 90% of the population taking the exam. This percentile is based on the last three years of GMAT scoring. And while both your Verbal and Quant scores are combined to produce an overall score, the average for each section is different. Have a look at the chart below: the mean for Quant is 37.5 and the mean is 27.3 for the Verbal section. Why? Because GMAT takers tend to get a higher score in the Quant section, so the average is higher.

Now look at the chart again to see what percentage ranking each raw score corresponds with. You will see that scores below 7 and above 45 are quite rare in the Verbal section, whereas below 6 and above 51 are rare in the Quant. Note that the percentiles do change from time to time. At Economist GMAT Tutor, we update the percentiles in our exams accordingly so you'll always know where you stand.

Chart 1: GMAT Score Scales*

The role of adaptivity in your GMAT score

The Verbal and Quant sections are the two portions of the GMAT that are adaptive. This means that the difficulty of each question you encounter is determined by how you answered the previous question of the same type. You will start off answering questions at an average difficulty level in each type—your first Sentence Correction question will be of average difficulty, your first Critical Reasoning question will be of average difficulty, and so forth and so on. If you answer these early questions correctly, your ensuing questions in that same topic will jump up a level of difficulty; and if you answer them incorrectly, your next questions in that topic will drop in difficulty. Eventually the algorithm determines your academic competency by presenting you with questions that correspond to your highest level of proficiency. After the first 5 questions the jumps or falls are more severe than after say, 25 questions (bigger corpus = more precision).

Number of questions correct x difficulty = GMAT score

Because of the adaptive nature of the exam, your GMAT score will be derived not just from how many questions you answer correctly (and incorrectly) but also the difficulty level of the questions themselves. In other words, answering higher-level questions correctly will yield a higher score than answering the same number of easy questions correctly (which is why the test's determination of your competence and the consequent questions it delivers to you matters).

Other factors in your GMAT score

Now that you know how your correct answers are weighted, here are two other score factors to keep in mind:

You will be penalized if you leave out any answers at the end, so brush up on your time management skills

You will also be penalized if you guess the last bunch of questions (i.e. you ran out of time and figure it's better to add random answers than leave them blank). By blindly guessing questions in a row you risk getting a series of multiple answers wrong, which is also a no-no in the GMAT.

Here’s what you can do to avoid these score traps:

Answer all the questions, but also...

Avoid going too slow in the beginning. By developing an efficient pace, you won't run out of time and resort to guessing at the end and/or making a string of errors. But then, of course...

Avoid going too fast. Going too fast through your early questions has the same effect of running out of time at the end (i.e. careless errors and sloppy guessing) except with the added damage of potentially having the exam adapt to your wrong answers and consequently serving you lower-tiered questions that won't benefit your score as much, even if you get them right.

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